Unburying my book chapters

Nobody reads book chapters any more. Which is a shame because I’ve written four of them. So today, as an act of procrastination, I completed the job of adding them to this website.

I thought I’d try something a bit different. As well as uploading the PDFs, I also pasted the text straight into the webpage. Hopefully, this should make the reading experience a little more pleasant, particularly for anyone trying to read on a tablet or smartphone.

In fact, it got me wondering why we don’t do this more often with journal articles. Most academic journals won’t let you post the final version of your own papers as they appear in the journal. But they will allow you to post the text before they “added value” by making them look nice.

The assumption is that you’ll only ever post the ugly double-spaced Times New Roman preprint, which nobody really wants to look at. But pasting the text straight into WordPress (or whatever you use for your website) is super easy. It does the prettifying for you. And it automatically optimizes the display for whatever device the reader is using.

Anyway, here are the chapters. I feel obliged to mention that, if you like them, you can buy the whole books. Alternatively, you might be able to persuade your library to fork out on your behalf!